Mailbag!

I've had a few emails lately that need sharing First up is Jeff from Pennsylvania...

Hey Mark, more science pieces, please! The United States is on the cutting edge of scientific research in the world and I think you should showcase some of the latest inventions.

You are absolutely right, Jeff. I will endeavor to do so.

Marie from Utah...

How about some more posts about women's issues? You used to write about more of them back when you blog first started.

Did I? I guess it's hard for me to write on some of those subjects because I'm not a woman but I do see the need to touch on those topics more often. Most of my friends are women and they do say that I am all dude with the heart and soul of a woman!

Owen from Minnesota (hey, that's my hometown!),

My biggest complaint about your site is that you talk too much about politics. I have your blog on my RSS and I don't even bother if it's a political post. A big part of the reason for that are the comments. You should really moderate them and lay down some rules. The people that post here all the time are personally very insulting to you. That would not be allowed on a respectable site.

Well, this isn't a respectable site so if you have a problem with it, don't read it. As I have said many times, their comments serve a purpose, the core of which is a fantastic illustration of what conservatives are all about these days. By letting them say whatever they want, it's much easier to win elections:) Speaking of my commenters...

Suzie from Oregon...

Hey Mark, do you really use people's real names and states? Not My Name has a point about privacy. Don't use my real name if you post this. Just call me Suzie from Oregon.

I think you answered your own question, Suzie. And half the time I can't really tell what someone's name is from their email so I make one up and add the state based on my site tracking stats.

That's all for Mailbag this time, folks. Drop me a line in the form to the right of this post if you want to have your voice heard in a way other than comments.

Dudes, Paul Says Take A Chill Pill

Paul Begala's recent piece on the Affordable Care Act woes is very sound advice. He also takes a certain group of people to the mat who are very deserving.

Yet despite the bed-wetting from Beltway Chicken Littles, the President's problems are eminently fixable. The Affordable Care Act isn't collapsing. The Obama presidency isn't imploding. And the ninnies making those sweeping and stupid predictions will one day look like the Washington pundit who boldly declared of the Clinton presidency, "This week we can talk about 'Is the presidency over?' " He asked that question 11 days after Bill Clinton's inaugural. His first inaugural. Clinton's presidency was not over for another 2,911 days.

And look where President Clinton is now...hallowed in the ranks with Reagan, Lincoln and Roosevelt.

So, take a chill pill, folks and feel free to "stamp Obamacare to your forehead" as Reince Priebus suggests. In the long run, it's going to work out quite well. The party that tried to fix health care and ran into some snags will be viewed more favorably than the party that had nothing and against everything.

CBS and Benghazi

I've gotten more than a few emails wondering what I thought about the CBS News-Benghazi hullabaloo so I guess I better comment about it. My reluctance stems from a now core belief not to feed the insanity inside the right wing bubble. Give them a shining example of how lying about Benghazi is rampant and they will...continue to lie about Benghazi. Why? Because they are adolescents.

Besides, I think Bill Maher did a much better job of summing it all up than I ever could.

“He told a story about Benghazi and the night the s—- went down that was very damning to Obama. And of course, Fox News and the National Review and all the right-wing outlets said, ‘Hey! You gotta watch this!’” Maher said. Maher read a tweet from the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg that said the segment “corroborates” with Fox News’s reporting. “It sure does, ‘cause it turned out to be total bulls—-!” Maher said Maher then asked why there haven’t been retractions from the conservative media who promoted the interview, after it turned out to be a false account.

It will never cease to amaze me how people get sucked into this crap purely based on their emotions and pathological hatred of the president and anyone to the left of the 1 yard line on the right side of the field.

Hitchin' Your Wagon To Georgie's Star

Well, it looks like George Zimmerman has been arrested again and charged with aggravated felony assault. He lost his temper at his girlfriend, Samantha Scheibe, and pointed a shotgun at her. This comes as no surprise to those of us who live outside of the bubble of douche and will likely not move anyone who lives inside of it. Heck, she probably deserved it! Let's please make sure that Georgie gets to carry as many guns as he wants because he clearly is being responsible with them!!

I do hope, though, that at least a few folks might reflect and realize that hitchin' their wagon to his star wasn't the best idea. In fact, the whole incident demonstrates that all one really has to do with these sorts of incidents, issues and debates is be patient. Eventually, the "win" of the moment will be revealed for the paper fortress that it is.

Body Organs and the Free Market

Obama's Poll Numbers

Most of the major polling places show the president dropping in the polls to the low 40s. Understandable, considering that he is responsible for the fumbled roll out of the Affordable Care Act web site and registration. So why does Rasmussen, a conservative polling operation, show him dropping only a few points and staying in the mid 40s?

My thought is that Americans aren't as upset with the president as the political media is making it out to be. We haven't heard any stories about the people finding better policies, only stories that are negative. Of course, that is what is popular right now:)

Couple Making Out At Bus Stop Like It's Fucking Paris

Missing Guns

One of the main reasons why there is so much gun violence in this country is that people are simply irresponsible with guns. The gun community can't seem to get their head around this fact. This recent piece illustrates just how bad it is.

In October GOP congresswoman Renee Ellmers reported that her gun had gone missing from her Kansas home. Ellmers, who left her AR-15 leaning against a locker in her unlocked garage, is an avid gun rights supporter. She claims that gun owners, like herself, are totally responsible and don’t need the government interfering in their business. As it turns out, however, Ellmers, like too many other gun owners, isn’t as responsible as she claims. Hopefully, her missing gun will not be used to murder someone. But even if it does, surely we can’t blame her? She’s a “responsible” gun owner, after all. 

After Missouri House staffer, Dave Evans, left his loaded gun in the men’s restroom of the State Capital Building on September 23, 2013, the incident drew a brief flurry of national media attention. It also drew the typical right-wing responses about all the “responsible gun owners” in the world. Except, you know, when they leave the gun in the bathroom…

The whole article is filled with incidents like this. My personal favorite is the one about the criminal who scolded the "responsible" gun owner. The saddest ones were stories like this.

Let's set aside the paranoia and pathological hatred of the federal government and leave the religion about the 2nd amendment behind forever. The current laws regarding firearms are not working because people are simply not responsible enough to live up to them.

Deeply Rooted In Nonviolence

I'm not much of a Wikipedia guy but their entry on Christian pacifism is excellent. We sadly forget how our Savior was deeply rooted in nonviolence...

Only One Verse

The Bible only has one verse that directly comments on the value of a fetus. Here it is.

And if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no [further] injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any [further] injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. (Exodus 21:22-25)

So, a fetus is essentially worth a fine determined by a judge. Note that if the woman dies, then it is "life for a life" so there is a definite distinction the life of an adult and the life of child, or in this case, a fetus. The historical context of this makes perfect sense as children were generally thought of as "less than" during this time period. It really wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that cultural attitudes shifted to the concept of the "Precious Child."

This would be an excellent example of how a teaching in the Bible no longer applies to today. Many believe that a fetus is life and I would agree once the child reaches a certain stage of development (the heart is formed and the brain divides into five vesicles). I have no issue with abortion up until this point but after that, I do. The federal ban on third term abortions should extended to the second term. This is where the pro choice crowd should compromise.

Where the pro life crowd should compromise is on freeing up money for sex education and pummeling women in their 20s (the ones most likely to get an abortion) with information and incentives to not have an unwanted pregnancy. The goal should be to reduce the demand for abortion, not attack the supply except in the case of 2nd term abortions. An outright ban on all abortions would create numerous problems such as a criminal enterprise, higher costs for social programs and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of unwanted children...which we have far too many of already.

Getting around the conundrum of people behaving irresponsibly is tough. This is the bane of the gun community as every day they look like assholes because far too many Americans can't be trusted with guns. Clearly, they can't be trusted with sex either. So, how do we change that?

Obviously, I don't have all the answers.

Right For That Generation

Last Thursday I met an old friend round the pub to catch up. I hadn't seen him in far too many years and have known him since I was six years old. It was fun to spend an evening with someone who lived nearly all of your life in a parallel fashion. The common experiences of living in the same neighborhood and going to the same schools for K-12 really warmed my heart and made me feel very connected to my wonderful memories of my childhood.

We talked about a great many subjects, politics, sex and religion among them. When he was younger, he was pretty hardcore Democrat but has since become more Republican and conservative. I guess that's what a few years at Bethel College will do for you! But he's still got a ton of common sense as he spent much of the night laying into the far right, the Tea Party, and, yes, even Christian conservatives. He would likely be labeled a RINO by today's incarnation of the Right and banished for lack of purity.

The statement that really drove this point home and one that completely blew me away came from our discussion about the Bible. I gave him my usual line about the Bible being wrong about some things to which he replied, "Mark, the Bible isn't wrong. It's just that some of it was right for that generation."

Wow.

And no shit.

He cited the rules on pork, for example, as being simple common sense because they didn't have a way to keep it fresh. Those rules applied for that time. The same was true, he felt, for homosexuality and I've talked about this previously. Back at the time the Bible was written, sex was much different than it is now. People were far cruder and roman orgies were rampant. Young boys were abused and people had much less control over themselves sexually than we do today. In short, there were no Neils and Steves who have been life partners for 20 years and have adopted children from Central America.

There are many universal truths in the Bible that span generation to generation. Loving thy neighbor, the Ten Commandments, serving the poor, helping the sick, not judging others, and being as peaceful and loving a person as you can be. Then there are the beliefs that were only true for that time...the ceremonial laws about food, appearance, and dress...the subjugation of women...sexual mores...attitudes about slavery...anyone with a brain realizes that those things applied to that time but not ours.

Of course, these days I think that those without a brain should just go right on thinking that those laws still apply to today. I used to think they should just let go of those beliefs but I realize now that I am older and wiser that people like that need those the threat of hellfire to keep them from raping a young boy on crystal meth in a hotel room. Their loss of control translates into a clear and present danger to our culture and are quite clearly beyond all help.

After all, we are a culture that helps the disabled, right?

How Gay!

Warped Kubrick

I don't know what to think about this story that I recently discovered in my "To Post, Misc" file. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is one long metaphor for the slaughter of Native Americans? Or it's a confession that Kubrick helped fake the moon landing? Completely silly and completely fascinating at the same time! Here is the first 12 minutes...

Dear Mr. Watterson

In this day and age, every article of clothing is prominently emblazoned with the manufacturer's logo, successful comic books and novels are optioned for Hollywood movies, and fictional characters are turned into action figures, plush dolls, Halloween costumes, etc. Isn't it suspicious that Ewoks look like highly-merchandisable teddy bears? Religious holidays like Christmas and Easter have turned into orgies of consumption. Everything in our culture is commercialized and monetized to the maximum extent possible, until its currency is so debased that it becomes a cliche.

Take, for example, the Garfield comic strip: it was in a lot of papers, but there was really nothing to it. Yet they have sold millions of stuffed Garfields, and they even made a movie out of a lousy three-panel comic strip that was about about a cat that eats lasagna. Strips like Bloom County and Dilbert were higher quality and were frequently about something, but they also went the merchandising route, cashing in on plush Opuses and Dogberts. The Simpsons is a merchandising monolith.

In such a world it's hard to imagine someone who would turn down all that cold hard cash to maintain artistic integrity. Yet there is such a man. He and his creation are the topic of a documentary called Dear Mr. Watterson. The director was recently interviewed on NPR.

The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, written and drawn by Bill Watterson, was a classic. It's about Calvin, a boy who thinks his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, is real. Calvin is constantly ambushed by Hobbes, and Calvin talks about this imaginary playmate as if he's a real tiger. His friends think he's nuts, but he has amazing adventures with dinosaurs and spaceships and film noir detectives, even though the world around him is disappointingly mundane.

People still love Calvin and Hobbes: it was smart, funny, philosophical, touching, poignant and sometimes mean and crude. It ran for 10 years, and when Watterson had said everything he wanted to say, he stopped writing the strip. That was almost 20 years ago. In a world where pointless comics like Mark Trail and Rex Morgan, M.D., soldier on for decades, penned by faceless corporate shills, Watterson voluntarily ended one of the best comic strips ever written.

Bill Watterson never sold out, even though the strip has the most obvious merchandising gimmick you can imagine. One of the titular characters is a stuffed animal. But you can't get an officially licensed Hobbes stuffed tiger.

It's not like Watterson is a pauper and needs to sell out: Calvin and Hobbes was tremendously successful during its run, and book-length collections of the strips are still doing a brisk business. The strip is syndicated in reruns and you can see it on the web. So Watterson has no financial need to sell out: he's got a steady income and has maintained the artistic integrity of his creation.

But that doesn't stop the vast majority of successful artists and writers from cashing in. Most, given the opportunity, decide to merchandise their creations even though they're already doing quite well.

Now, I'm not saying that selling out is always a bad thing. But most Americans seem to take it as an article of faith that more is better, as so eloquently stated in the immortal words of The Tick, spoken to his disciples in the Mystic Order of Arachnid Vigilance (from The Tick #9, "Road Trip", 1991):

Always ... always remember: Less is less. More is more. More is better, and twice as much is good too... Not enough is bad, and too much is never enough except when it's just about right.

This attitude, which almost caused the collapse of our entire economic system in 2008, was presaged in the pages of The Tick. To finance their organization the M.O.A.V. planned to "buy real estate for no-money down and sell it at huge profits!" The author was a seer!
  
The Tick is a satirical superhero comic created by Ben Edlund, who has "sold out" several times with licensed merchandise and animated and live-action television versions of The Tick. He's also done a lot of work in Hollywood (well, mostly Canada) on shows such as Firefly, Angel, Supernatural and Revolution.

So, yeah, he's a sellout. But if Edlund had never sold out I wouldn't have found the original black and white Tick comics. The shows he's worked on, and the specific episodes and characters he's created are self-aware, self-critical and self-deprecating. They never take themselves too seriously.

It warms my heart that Bill Watterson can keep the memory of Calvin and Hobbes pristine (at least until his money-grubbing heirs get their mitts on it). But I also like that Edlund went on to do a lot of new and entertaining work that was made possible by him selling out.

The most important thing is these men got to choose: they had control over their creations and could choose whether to license them. This is unlike many artists and writers who've been shafted by giant corporations, like Siegel and Shuster of Superman fame.

If there's anything that should be changed in our intellectual property laws it's the idea that the creator of a work of art can sign away the rights to their creations. It should be illegal, like selling your own children.

To decide whether something is a sell-out or not, you have to ask whether the merchandising is a betrayal of the original artistic concept. Star Wars action figures? Not a sellout. Superman Halloween costume? Not a sellout. Tick live-action TV series? A lousy failure, but not a sellout.

But the core of Calvin and Hobbes is that Calvin's antics and the living, breathing Hobbes are products of his vivid imagination. Calvin can take any mundane object and through the power of his mind transform it into a grand adventure.

A licensed Hobbes stuffed tiger that replaces a child's imagination with a product manufactured by people whose childhood dreams ended in a sweatshop making slave wages? Definitely a sellout.

State's Highest Paid Employee?

A Little Low?

12 Million Americans Believe Lizard People Run Our Country.

That number is actually lower than I expected!

Hilarious!

I don't know why but I've been on a real photo kick lately. It truly is a medium that has exploded thanks to social media. But it also has an eye to the past and that's why I completely adored this site. What a fantastic idea! Check it out!

Best. Photo. Ever.

He's Right

Michael Tomasky is absolutely right when the says that the Democrats need to to stop freaking out and take charge. They tend to get sucked in to the news cycle panic of the moment and forget about the the long term picture. In the final analysis, this is where we are at.

The current situation is serious. But I remember a lot of other times when it was supposedly curtains for Obama, too, because inside the Beltway, the more disciplined Republicans, who after all are in the luxurious position of just sitting back and firing away, have an easier time winning news cycles. But out beyond the Beltway, the party that shut down the government for three weeks and killed immigration reform and wants to decimate food stamps and can’t even pass its own spending bills doesn’t look very appealing to most people. The fate of Obamacare can be changed. The DNA of the GOP cannot.

How To Admit Fault

I challenge any conservative to show me a Republican that is this reflective and honest.

 

The Barack Obama they hate simply doesn't exist.

The Magic Bullet Was Ordinary After All

With the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination coming up, NOVA ran an episode called "Cold Case JFK" that may interest conspiracy theorists.

Using the slim evidence left over from the botched investigations in 1963 and experiments with a rifle identical to the one Lee Harvey Oswald bought mail order, ballistics experts Luke and Mike Haag and other forensics experts put together a pretty convincing case that Oswald fired all three shots: The first one missed. The second one hit Kennedy in the back, exited at the neck, passed through Governor John Connally, passed through his wrist and then lodged in his leg. The third bullet hit Kennedy in the back of the head, causing a small entry wound and a large explosion of brain and blood at the exit point in the forehead.

Carcano 6.5 mm cartridge

30.06 cartridge

Rear View of Magic Bullet

The bullet in question was a 6.5x52mm Carcano cartridge, similar to the one shown on the right. A 6.5 mm Carcano model 91/38 carbine was found in the Texas Schoolbook Depository with Oswald's handprint on it. The key thing about this bullet is the long, cylindrical shape of the slug (the part of the cartridge that's fired from the rifle). Most rifle bullets are like the 30.06 slug below on the the right: more conical than cylindrical.

The cylindrical shape of the Carcano slug means that it has more contact with the riflings inside the rifle barrel than a 30.06 slug does, which gives it more spin and therefore makes it fly truer through the air.

However, once it passes through something -- say, a head or ballistics gel -- it begins to "yaw" or tumble. The bullet had started to tumble when it struck Connally, and hit him sideways instead of straight on.

The Haags' experiments in the NOVA program bear all this out.

The Carcano slug was also copper-jacketed, which means it would deform less than a naked lead slug. And the slug that was found on Connally's gurney was deformed -- the rear end was pinched in, just as you would expect if it hit Connally sideways, as shown in the third photo.

The third bullet hit Kennedy in the back of the head and caused a massive shockwave through the skull, causing the forehead to explode. The pattern of cracks in the skull is consistent with a rear entry wound, ruling out a shot from the Grassy Knoll. The backward jerking of Kennedy's body evident in the Zapruder film was due to a spasm that caused all Kennedy's muscles to contract, but since back muscles are stronger than abdominals, his head jerked back.

Other incidentals such as people hearing more than three shots are due to echoes and the supersonic speed of the Carcano slug.

From all this it seems that Oswald really was the lone gunman. Which means Arlen Specter and the Warren Commission actually got something right with the single-bullet theory.

Oswald, an avowed Marxist, apparently tried to assassinate Edwin Walker, a retired general who Oswald called a Fascist (Walker had tried to stop desegregation in Mississippi). So it's plausible that Oswald was a nut and was just moving on to higher things by assassinating Kennedy, with no orders from Cuba or Moscow or Vegas or the Teamsters. Oswald may also have had an accomplice in the Walker assassination attempt, which means... Well, you get the picture.

However, the fact that Oswald shot Kennedy single-handedly doesn't mean there was no conspiracy. Jack Ruby's shocking murder of Oswald on live TV is incomprehensible. Why would a strip club owner with mob connections sacrifice his own life to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of testifying in the trial of the century?

Unfortunately, forensics and ballistics will never provide the answers for the machinations that led up to Ruby's silencing of Oswald.

Hating Pope Frank

I've been laughing my socks right off of my feet as the Right reacts to Pope Francis and his vision that primarily involves Christians actually (gasp!) doing the work of Jesus. You know, feeding the poor...taking care of the sick and less fortunate...as opposed to judging others and being maniacally obsessed with sex. None have been more shocked than Sarah "I'm on a book tour so it's time for me to say dumb shit" Palin.



OMG, Sarah!! Jesus was, in fact, a liberal:)

Welfare Myths

I'm pretty sick and tired of all the myths being spread out there regarding people on welfare. Thankfully, this piece torpedoes nine of them quite well. Here are three that stand out.

Myth: “People on welfare are lazy and sit at home collecting it while the rest of us work to support them.” 

Fact: The welfare reform law that was signed by President Clinton in 1996 largely turned control over welfare benefits to the states, but the federal government provides some of the funding for state welfare programs through a program called Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF). TANF grants to states require that all welfare recipients must find work within two years of first receiving benefits. This includes single parents, who are required to work at least 30 hours per week. Two-parent families are required to work 35 to 50 hours per week. Failure to obtain work could result in loss of benefits. It is also worth noting that, thanks to the pay offerings of companies such as Walmart, many who work at low wage jobs qualify for public assistance, even though they work full-time.

Right. People that get assistance are already working. Their jobs simply don't pay enough. And bitch all you want about federal spending on food stamps but the states are the ones that largely control aid to the poor.

Myth: “There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards. … She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000″ – Ronald Reagan

Fact: Ah, the “welfare queen.” Ronny loved to tell his stories, and his welfare queen story is one of the most popular. The only problem is, the woman he talked about didn’t exist. There is some evidence that elements of this story may have been based on facts, but the descriptions of abuse by an actual woman were wildly exaggerated by Reagan.

The Right loves to make shit up (see: lie). This would be a great example.

Myth: “Most welfare recipients are minorities and illegal immigrants.” 

Fact: TANF benefits were paid out to roughly the same percentage of white and black recipients in 2010, according to the HHS report. In fact, the percentage of black families receiving welfare benefits has declined by almost 7 percent since 2000. Regarding illegal immigrants: those who are in the United States illegally are ineligible for benefits other than emergency Medicaid.

Many of those white folks are rural poor in deep red states. If they could only realize that the people they support are essentially lying to them with religion and are actively trying to fuck them, every state would basically be blue.

Welfare falsehoods really piss me off. Spread this post and the included links around and don't let the Right continue their lying.

Finally

Well, Joe McLean has gone and done it. The Daily Beast columnist has put up the perfect description of my three regular commenters (juris imprudent, Guard Duck, Not My Name). Now I think I understand how they are all united even though they have differing views on religion.

Apocalypticism.

They, along with the Tea Party and many other conservatives, think the End Times are nigh. And guess what? It's all the fault of the liberals.

There are so many great lines in this piece I don't know where to start. Let's see if I can limit myself to just three and then urge y'all to go and read the rest.

They believe America teeters on the brink of destruction, and hold as an article of faith that liberals, gays, Democrats, atheists and the United Nations are to blame. This “end-times” world-view is a foundational precept of the evangelical movement, from which many of the so-called Tea Party favorites spring.Of course, the Tea Party is not just composed of members of the Christian right. Many are genuine libertarians. Some nurse an unreconstructed Confederate grudge, while others harbor a thinly disguised racism. However, the real energy, the animating force for the movement comes from evangelicals, of whom Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin are the most strident. These are the modern-day ”apocalyptic prophets.”

See, you don't have to be a Christian to believe in the apocalypse. Kevin Baker isn't a Christian. Neither is juris. Yet there is something in their libertarianism that helps them along to end times thinking. McLean does a good job of explaining the history of end times thinking. But how does that fit in to today?

For these apocalyptic prophets, the issues aren’t even political anymore; they’re existential, with Obamacare serving as the avatar for all evil. In this construct, any compromise whatsoever leads to damnation, and therefore the righteous ends justify any means. Now if you are battling the forces of evil for the very survival of the nation, there can be no retreat, no compromise, and no deals. Like the Jewish zealots at Masada, it’s better to commit glorious suicide than make peace with the devil. There can be no truce with the Tea Party because its apocalyptic zealots can never take “yes” for an answer.

Compromise as damnation...yep. McLean also notes what I have been stating previously. The GOP establishment and business wing of the party is fighting back. The coming civil war in the Republican party is going to be bloody. But how will it all end? McLean says either the pragmatists win or the hardliners revolt and leave. Either way, a center right party emerges that will enjoy support.

Not surprisingly, these moderates have both liberal and conservative views. 64% support gay marriage, 63% support abortion in the first trimester, 52% support legalizing marijuana, and they support a strong social safety net by wide margins. But 81% support offshore drilling, 90% support the death penalty and 57% are against affirmative action. So a new moderate coalition might well attract significant support from the moderate middle, establishment Republicans, Independents and centrist Democrats too.

Whatever way you cut it, my three commenters, along with the Tea Party and the right wing blogsphere, aren't going to get what they want. Oh well. At least they'll have plenty to complain about. Hey, maybe we could help them set up their own community with all the rest of the doomsayers. They could walk around all day preaching apocalypse to each other and leave the rest of us sane people out of it.

Shades of Gray Willfully Ignored

It always stuns me when conservatives and, in particular, the gun community, make truly thoughtless statements. One such statement popped in comments a while back which can be essentially summed up as this: if someone is too mentally ill to handle a gun, they are too mentally ill to be out in society.

Setting aside the complete lack of intelligence in terms of mental health issues, how people are institutionalized and...well...that the world is shades of gray (not so black and white), statements like this show just how religious these folks are about guns. It's not about the 2nd amendment anymore. It's about proselytizing. Worse, it really illustrates just how ignorant these folks are regarding human nature and how they completely misunderstand, either by free choice or pure ignorance, the fact that low levels of responsibility are the norm, not the exception, in this country. It's this simple fact that will eventually bite them hard in the ass.

These thoughts really crystallized for me a couple of days ago when two separate events occurred. The first one was a story my wife told me about a fellow parent at my son's school. She was having a conversation with another mom that turned to video games. My wife was pretty shocked to learn that this mom let her son play whatever games he wanted (like Call of Duty) even though he has had mental health problems. Compounding this waiting disaster was the mom's admission that she and her husband were going to get their conceal and carry permits and how they were going to start taking their 11 year old son (the one with the mental health problems and love of Call of Duty) to the range on a regular basis to "turn him into a man." It's nice to know the next Adam Lanza will be just a few short blocks away.

Later that day, I went and played tennis with a younger guy who was clearly on the autism spectrum. He was very picky and jumpy throughout the match, admonishing me for not handing him the balls in the right way on the changeover. A couple of times he just wigged out because he thought he saw a ball flying onto the court from another court and in reality, there was nothing. He apologized after the match, noting his mental health issues, and asked me to give him a break. We never talked about guns but it occurred to me that, while this guy was just fine to be out in public, he would decidedly not be fine given a firearm.

There are many people in this country that are not dangerous in and of themselves. But you start adding in elements to the mix of a perfect cocktail and you can very easily have an explosion of violence. It's not as black and white as the commenter assured me (shocking). Everyone is different and each mental issue is complex with each individual. To say that they should all be institutionalized simply because they can't be trusted with a gun is completely myopic.

And I am real tired of the annual culling that goes on from gun violence as a result of this ignorance.

Huh?

Linguists have found the first universal word, a word that is in every language spoken on earth.

Huh?

Yes, it's the word "huh?" The authors of the study published in PLOS One call it an "other-initiated repair," an element of language

in which one participant produces a turn at talk, the other then signals some trouble with this turn, and finally the first produces a next turn which aims to solve the trouble, usually by means of repetition and/or modification. In some languages the interjection, or an item similar to it, was also found in other sequential environments, for instance to mark surprise or to pursue a response.

The exact pronunciation of huh? varies somewhat from one language to another, much like the word "dog" might be pronounced "dawg" or "dowg" or "dahg" or "doug" or "doh-oog" in different parts of the world.

But still, the pronunciation of huh? is amazingly consistent: a single syllable, nasal, low front to middle vowel, never ending in a consonant. The intonation is rising in all languages except those  having a falling interrogative prosody (to keep it consistent with other question sentences).

Some people might argue that huh? isn't even a word. I might have agreed until a few years ago, when my sister suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and lost her ability to speak. She can now form words only with extreme difficulty, and after many successive repetitions, when the signals finally get from her brain to her throat, tongue and lips. And still it sounds like a rusted gate opening, clumsy and nothing like her original voice. She knows exactly what she's trying to say, but her injured brain simply cannot force the sounds out. Even with words as simple as yes and no.

But when she says huh? she sounds exactly like her old self, no hesitation or mispronunciation. That implies that huh? is part of a lower-level universal vocabulary.

This makes me wonder if there are other utterances that are part of this ur-vocabulary. After trying unsuccessfully to form a sentence, my sister sighs with frustration, just like anyone else might. Is the sigh of frustration universal? Laughter seems to be universal, though individual laugh "accents" differ greatly. How widely understood are "uh-uh" or "mm-mm" for no, and "uh-huh" or "mm-hmm" for yes?

In any case, this means that when someone blurts at you in a foreign language, responding with "huh?" will get the message across loud and clear.

Simply Wrong

For the most part, I think it's best to not use comparisons to slavery in this day and age. But if you are Sarah Palin and want to get attention, then I guess it's OK!




Ignoring the obvious offensiveness of the statement, it's simply wrong as I have demonstrated just recently. Our debt is not entirely owned by the Chinese. For the most part, it's money we owe ourselves and it isn't that big of a problem.

Conservatives like to talk about how it's all "simple math" yet they completely ignore our assets as a country (hundreds of trillions of dollars), our economy ($17 trillion and growing), and our very steady revenue stream (just south of $6 trillion a year). Their irrational screeds about spending sound more and more like sermons and proselytizing and less like actual facts. Of course, Sarah Palin can best be summed up like this...

Reality?

When You Hear Their Answers...

As I have said many times, the biggest impediment to progress in this country is the conservative movement as it stands today (see: apocalyptic cult). While we are seeing signs of them moving away from psychosis, they seem unable to grasp that our country has one direction: forward. Yet, it is not simply the conservative that are holding us back. Another big impediment are the liberals themselves.

Liberals are, by their very nature, diplomatic and reflective. So when conservatives say things like climate change is a hoax perpetuated by people want to control us or that having universal background checks means a national registry, we pause and wonder if what they are saying might be true. That's where the first mistake is made. We take their assertions at face value. The second mistake is then the movement toward the playing field that they want to play on (i.e. where they can "win"). By even considering that climate change legislation is going to lead to internment camps or that a national registry is really, really bad, we feed into their paranoia and, sadly, embolden their argument.

So, the lesson is quite simple. Refuse to allow them to set the table. Ignore the impulse to be diplomatic and fair minded when they say something ridiculous. Instead, ask questions. Why is a national registry bad? What happens after that? Who are those people whose backgrounds are not checked now? What should we do with them instead? What should we do about climate change?

When you hear their answers, it will become obvious very quickly that these people should not be in charge of anything.

Veteran's Day Thoughts

When most Americans think of veterans, they imagine an older man in a baseball cap with United States flag on it. Certainly, there are plenty of veterans out there who fit that description. If you see one today, walk up to them, touch them on the shoulder and thank them for their service.

Yet there are plenty of young veterans as we can see in the photo below from USATODAY.

These are the faces of an entire new generation of veterans that very much need to be recognized for their service in the last decade. Two, three, four and even five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan have weighed heavily on the minds of young veterans and turned the spotlight onto the issue of mental health and PTSC (post traumatic stress disorder). Two people very close to me have struggled with mental illness after their service in Afghanistan. One was a marine who served three tours in that country and has struggled enormously with the guilt of surviving where so many of his brothers...close friends in his unity...have died.

They need our support and it can be something as little as just spending time with them and checking in regularly to make sure they are OK. Monetary donations are always nice but your time is much more valuable. Show them how grateful we all are!

Good and Bad

From upworthy.com...

What is your state good at?

What is your state bad at?

True Geography

As someone who occasionally teaches geography, it's important to remember this lesson.

World News Roundup

Turing to world news, the biggest story of the last few day is the massive destruction in the Philippines caused by what may very well be the biggest storm the world has ever seen. The images we have been seeing for the past couple of days have been positively heartbreaking. According to the BBC, Up to 10,000 are said to have died in Tacloban city and hundreds elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands are displaced.

The typhoon flattened homes, schools and an airport in Tacloban. Relief workers are yet to reach some towns and villages cut off since the storm. In many areas there is no clean water, no electricity and very little food. There were repors of nearly 300mph winds felt across the islands in the area. One has to wonder if this was simply a fluke event or something that will be more commonplace due to our changing climate. We won't know for certain as this is simply an isolated weather event but if we see more events like this, then it will be the trend climate scientists have been predicting.

---

Heartbreaking but in an entirely different way is the situation in the Central African Republic. The Seleka coalition of armed rebels ousted President Francois Bozize earlier this year. Since then the rebels have committed human rights violations on an "unprecedented scale," according to Reuters and Amnesty. The image in the link shows houses that have been burned in just one town.

Usually stories of violence in African nations are so common that people simply blow them off as just how things are there. They don't have to be, of course, and many of the solutions to the problems African nations face are rooted in structural flaws left behind by the exodus of European nations post imperialism. Direct aid helps but not as much as the nations of the Global North going into these countries and helping them create sustainable economies.

---

The United States and Iran have failed to reach a deal on Iran's nuclear program. Shocking, I know. What began as more hope then we have seen in years, ended abruptly when faced with hardliners political capital on all sides of the talks. In some ways, I agree with the hardliners like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Iran has to do much more than elect a new president who says nice things. Granted, President Rouhani has to deal with his own hardliners but with protests in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities that are deeply anti-American, his government is going to have to take significant action if they want movement on an end to the sanctions that are crippling his country.

---

Finally, it seems there is one country in the world that would like to give up their guns: Yemen. It seems that the citizens of Yemen would happily hand in their guns if their government provided better security.

Like most Yemeni men, Mahmoud Shahra owns a gun and has known how to use it since childhood, although the 25-year-old activist used to leave his weapons at home. But since the politically motivated kidnapping of one of his close friends earlier this year, Shahra has carried a gun at nearly all times. He seems at ease with his AK-47, but his demeanor hides internal disquiet. “Even if I feel safer and more confident, I feel like I’m betraying my values when I carry a gun,” he says. “Still, the current security environment has forced me to do so.”

Values? Hmm...

What Happens When We Die?

An answer to to this question would change the course of human history. For the believers of many religions, the soul moves on to the next life. For non-believers, death is the end and there is nothing else. Issue #307 of Fortean Times (one of my two favorite magazines, the other being the Christian Science Monitor) has a piece on page 16 that discusses exactly what happens after we die. The part that jumped out at me was this.

If all brain activity has ceased, where and how are the memories recalled by surviving cardiac patients being laid down? This was the point aptly raised by Dr Shushant Meshram, a neurophysiologist and sleep researcher from India who was speaking at the conference on precognition in dreams. His own suggested hypothesis is that our brains contain a non-physical component, which is involved with both NDE and other psi experiences. Certainly, there is much scope for further research here. 

A non-physical component found through research? Think of it...scientific evidence of the soul. Consider for a moment the rapid and exponential rate at which technology is exploding into the world. Given that new understandings are coming more quickly these days, I think we are indeed going to get a more scientific explanation for the human soul.

And our lives are going to change forever.

Questions

Amia Srinivasan has many questions for free market moralists that deserve answers. Indeed, her entire piece deserves careful study as at eloquently illustrates the dichotomy of welfare liberalism and laisse-faire liberalism. Here are the four questions.

1. Is any exchange between two people in the absence of direct physical compulsion by one party against the other (or the threat thereof) necessarily free?

2. Is any free (not physically compelled) exchange morally permissible?

3. Do people deserve all they are able, and only what they are able, to get through free exchange?

4. Are people under no obligation to do anything they don’t freely want to do or freely commit themselves to doing?

Her answer show free market fundamentalism for the sham that it is. Like those on the left who preach of socialist utopias, libertarian utopias have just as

Good Words

There’s a certain type of political journalism that so exists in the moment that numerous such moments have been declared to be disasters for Obama, going back to Jeremiah Wright. This kind of hyperventilating approach always turns out to be wrong and overheated. It turned out that all those things were pretty bad, but it also turned out that Obama survived them. And he’ll survive this, too. Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast.

The whole piece is fantastic and exactly why I continue to laugh at the hyperventilating:)

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

A few days ago I wrote about democracy and the Catholic Church. Lo and behold, my prayers were answered: they're going to poll their congregations about social issues. They're not exactly taking a vote, but it shows the Vatican might be paying attention to reality:

[...] Pope Francis, who has already shaken up the Vatican, is asking the world’s one billion Catholics for their opinions on a questionnaire covering social issues like same-sex marriage, cohabitation by unwed couples, contraception, and the place of divorced and remarried people in the church.

That last part is interesting. Under canon law, you cannot receive communion if you remarry without receiving a Decree of Nullity. But, like birth control, millions of remarried Catholics regularly ignore Church dogma and receive communion.

The usual argument against gay marriage is that it goes against "natural law." What most people don't know is that the Catholic catechism teaches that divorce is wrong because it goes against "the natural law":

2384 Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law. It claims to break the contract, to which the spouses freely consented, to live with each other till death. Divorce does injury to the covenant of salvation, of which sacramental marriage is the sign. Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to the gravity of the rupture: the remarried spouse is then in a situation of public and permanent adultery:

If a husband, separated from his wife, approaches another woman, he is an adulterer because he makes that woman commit adultery, and the woman who lives with him is an adulteress, because she has drawn another's husband to herself.

This entire argument boils down to "no backsies." If two people freely consenting to enter a contract is acceptable under natural law, why isn't freely consenting to cancel that same contract acceptable under natural law? Clearly, most Protestant churches think it's fine, and clearly, so does the Catholic Church because they have an entirely unnatural process to dance around it: they just want the Church to call all the shots when they issue a Decree of Nullity.

The natural law argument against gay marriage can somewhat reasonably be made because of reproductive biology (but see below). You can also argue that polygamy is not natural because males and females are born in equal numbers. Allowing one man to have many wives would inevitably cause inbreeding when his closely related descendants unwittingly married. There are serious issues of child support involved with polygamy. And what do poor men do when rich men hog all the women?

Although lifelong commitment to a single mate may be a Christian ideal, it is not the natural order of things: nothing about humans is permanent or universal. Lifelong monogamy is certainly not the case in the Bible: the Old Testament is riddled with men who had dozens and even hundreds of wives and concubines, and stories of men who steal other men's wives. It's certainly not the case in nature, in which many species are polygynous, polyandrous or promiscuous. Lifelong monogamy is merely a social practice in certain human cultures. It is common, but by no means universal. It can't be classified it as "natural" in the same sense that heterosexuality is natural, because it is required at some level for reproduction. (A weak case for lifelong monogamy can be made under natural law on the grounds that it reduces the chances of inbreeding.)

And then there's the question of "natural life expectancy." Is it reasonable to expect people to stay married for 50 or 60 years, considering that is double or triple the life expectancy when these dogmas were cast in stone? Life expectancy has ranged from 20 in the Neolithic to almost 80 in some countries today, though historically if you survived to marry your life expectancy would be 45 or 50. Unless, of course, you were a woman, in which case death in childbirth was appallingly common.

The real problem with the natural law argument is that it cuts both ways: it could eventually be used to justify gay marriage. There's a great deal of evidence that links biology to sexual orientation, the "born that way" hypothesis. If your brain structure makes you gay, and promiscuity is bad, isn't gay marriage inevitable under natural law?

That future Vatican III Council composed of a majority of gay bishops could well take everything we know about nature into account when they make their decisions, rather than limit their understanding of nature and science to beliefs held by theologians born millennia before the invention of the internal combustion engine.

WTF?

Running a blog is weird sometimes. This week a post from 2011 is getting beaucoup traffic. I wonder why? The photo? It was nice to revisit it, though:)

Getting Better

The National Center For Education Statistics released its 2013 report card and much to the dismay of right wing bloggers everywhere, it shows improved reading and math scores for both 4th and 8th graders. Granted, the improvement is small and there still is an obvious achievement gap issue (which, in the bubble, means "Who gives a fuck? They are all lazy") but it clearly shows that we are geed in the right direction.

For those of you who have trouble with the English language, that means not collapsing:)

Energy News A Go Go

There is quite a bit to talk about in energy news so let's get to it!

 First up is a call for nuclear power that I have been waiting for a long time. Check out the source!

Four scientists who have played a key role in alerting the public to the dangers of climate change sent letters Sunday to leading environmental groups and politicians around the world. The letter, an advance copy of which was given to The Associated Press, urges a crucial discussion on the role of nuclear power in fighting climate change. 

Environmentalists have the same problem with emotions and instransigence as the Right does in terms of their views on...well...just about everything:) Nuclear power is clean and much safer than the worry warts will have you believe. The letter signers are James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist; Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution; Kerry Emanuel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tom Wigley, of the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Speaking of climate change, a report on the effect of climate change on world food supplies has been leaked and the news is not good.

The warning on the food supply is the sharpest in tone the panel has issued. Its previous report, in 2007, was more hopeful. While it did warn of risks and potential losses in output, particularly in the tropics, that report found that gains in production at higher latitudes would most likely offset the losses and ensure an adequate global supply. 

The new tone reflects a large body of research in recent years that has shown how sensitive crops appear to be to heat waves. The recent work also challenges previous assumptions about how much food production could increase in coming decades because of higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The gas, though it is the main reason for global warming, also acts as a kind of fertilizer for plants.

For a closer look at this problem and all the data, click here. 

Will this be enough to convince people? I think when you start messing around with the food that Americans eat, they tend to react!

Finally, for the "Drill, Baby, Drill" crowd, it looks like we have a way around the northern section of Keystone.

Since July, plans have been announced for three large loading terminals in western Canada with the combined capacity of 350,000 barrels a day — equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to bring oil from western Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast. Over all, Canada is poised to quadruple its rail-loading capacity over the next few years to as much as 900,000 barrels a day, up from 180,000 today. 

Rail..uh oh! Republicans hate choo choos! Speaking of oil, why is the price of it so low right now? Because the dollar is stronger. How can that be? I thought we were heading for apocalypse! Also...

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said it expects demand for its crude oil to fall to 29.2 million barrels a day in 2018 from 30.3 million barrels a year this year. OPEC said rising supplies from other sources, such as Canadian oil sands, crude from Latin America and the increased use of biofuels would contribute to the fall in demand for its own output. 

Demand has fallen? Wait...I thought demand had nothing to do with price. And increased biofuels? What pinko nonsense!!

Good (?) Words

I put up a link to the Guns and Ammo story  on my FB page and got some very interesting responses. One of my friends posted the following comment.

I own a gun as well, and I can discuss the merits of a shotgun versus a handgun for home defense all day because It is a subject that interests me. I also play my share of FPS video games, and consider Splinter Cell to be the greatest video game series to date. However, I consider myself a gun owner and that's about it.

People like the ones I was referring to are zealots who refuse to even consider ways we can modify our pervasive gun culture and put a dent in the annual culling of over 11,000 of our fellow citizens. It is a mentality that makes no sense to me at all, from a logic standpoint. Their behavior these days looks less and less like people working to protect a Constitutionally guaranteed freedom and more like religious fervor and proselytizing.

Culling...religious fervor...proselytizing...check, check, and check.

When I told him of my prediction (a shooting at a gun show or some other place frequented by the gun community), he didn't agree and was surprisingly cynical.

They'll do what every one else does whenever a horrible crime makes the news: they'll ignore how their culture has contributed to the crime, then write it off as the 'actions of a sick individual', and go on about their lives, blinders intact. Some will even defend and apologize for, the individual in question. If so-called "responsible" adults can do this with crimes like rape, they can do it with spree shootings.

Sadly, he might be right.

Business Wins

Tuesday's election saw GOP establishment candidate Bradley Byrne beat Tea Party fave Dean Young in Alabama's 1st Congressional District. In what clearly is a sign for the ugly war that will be waged over the next year in the GOP, the business community has clearly had enough of the psychosis and adolescent behavior of the Tea Party and like minded people.

CNN has another story on this as does Politico. This would be why I'm not too worried about the mistakes made by the president and the Democrats in terms of the ACA. We don't have to beat the conservatives. They are beating themselves.

Yep

From Paul Krugman

As some of us have tried to explain, debt, while it can pose problems, doesn’t make the nation poorer, because it’s money we owe to ourselves. Anyone who talks about how we’re borrowing from our children just hasn’t done the math. 

True, debt can indirectly make us poorer if deficits drive up interest rates and thereby discourage productive investment. But that hasn’t been happening. Instead, investment is low because of the economy’s weakness. And one of the main things keeping the economy weak is the depressing effect of cutbacks in public spending — especially, by the way, cuts in public investment — all justified in the name of protecting the future from the wildly exaggerated threat of excessive debt. 

If only those "debt scolds" could leave their emotions and pride out of the equation, we'd have a better economy. My only disagreement with Krugman here is that he, like the people he criticizes, are far too pessimistic. Despite the idiocy of austerity, our economy is doing better as I noted earlier today. 

Mea Culpa Is Just Fine

The president apologized yesterday for his mistake in saying, "If you like your insurance, you get to keep it," several times during his campaign to pass the ACA. This is quite illustrative of the type of man he is: someone willing to admit mistakes and work to fix them. And that's just what he is going to do. Notice as well that he is taking the high ground and not blaming the insurance companies which he would be well within his purview to do as it is the truth.

This is quite a bit more than his opponents would do. They never admit error (see: Apocalypse), always blame others, and are actively working to destroy the structures of this country because they are essentially babies who can't accept defeat and any sort of authority in their lives. At election time next year, the problems with the ACA will be fixed (the real ones and not the fake ones made up in bubbleland) and the benefits are going to vastly outweigh the costs.

More importantly, we have seen an improving economy this week. GDP was 2.8 percent for the 3rd quarter and hiring in October exceeded expectations, clocking in over 200k jobs. Revisions were made for August and September, adding in an extra 60K jobs. Imagine how much stronger these numbers would have been had there not been a shutdown. The economy is what really matters to voters in elections and it's pretty clear which party is working to improve it and which one is rooting for it to fail.

Intellectually Bankrupt Indeed

I can't think of a better example of just how intellectually bankrupt and adolescent Ayn Rand followers (see: right wing blogsphere) are than the recent admission of plagiarism from Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. The words "Rand" and "plagiarize" do seem to fit together in some sort of perfect way, don't they? Being a Randian isn't really all that deep nor intelligent (obviously, if they cut and paste from Wikipedia) and essentially can be summed up in one sentence.

It's OK to be a douchebag.

Update: Apparently, it's OK to plagiarize as well. Breitbart.com has just hired Rand Paul. 

Here We Go Again

I guess we have to be reminded every few years just how fucking psycho the gun community is in this country. Good Lord...

There will be no wavering!! There will be only vigilance!!! Any sort of thinking or wavering that is against our vill...sorry...will calls for immediate retribution. Anyone who writes this...

I don’t think requiring 16 hours of training to qualify for a concealed carry permit is infringement But that’s just me.

Or this...

The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.

Or this...

I’ve seen too many examples of unsafe behavior on too many shooting ranges to believe otherwise. And we’ve all read too many accounts of legally armed individuals dealing with the consequences of not being properly trained or prepared when confronted with a bad situation.

is a fucking pinko commie faggot who needs to be liquidated. Robert Farago summed it up best.

Anyone who says ‘I believe in the Second Amendment but—’ does not believe in the Second Amendment. They are not friends, they are not frenemies, they are enemies of The People of the Gun.

The People of the Gun, huh? Yeah, I''m quaking in my boots (see: there will be no revolution as long as men have titties) Here's Wonkette's take.

Translation: You fuckers scare even us, but we still want your money, so fuck “a healthy exchange of ideas”: Metcalf is history. Please keep buying our magazine, please? Not that the fondlers are satisfied — now many are calling for Bequette to resign for having allowed the piece to run in the first place. 

Update: And as of this afternoon, Guns & Ammo editor Jim Bequette has resigned as well. Business Insider reports that while the magazine had been due to get a new editor January 1, Bequette “announced he would expedite the process and resign immediately.” Because of an editorial suggesting the utterly unthinkable, tyranny-promoting notion that people who own guns should be trained to use them safely. Welcome to America in 2013.

I don't share her fear of the gun people. Honestly, they are a bunch of cowards. The first people to squirt in their pants and hand over their guns to some sort of authority will be them. The reason why they bitch so much about authority is because they themselves are authoritarians who want a return to the aristocracy of the Antebellum South and are obviously self-loathing.

As I have said many times, when an incident occurs that will affect them personally due to their complete ignorance of how irresponsible people are in this country, then they will change. In the meantime, I do find it heartening that they continue to alienate more and more people who are on their side.

Democracy and the Catholic Church

The Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has been having its own sex scandal, in which various priests were caught soliciting boys in bookstores, storing child porn on their computers, having sex with underage parishioners, and so on, with the church hierarchy keeping it all covered up and paying off the perpetrators with extra cash. Several church officials have now resigned.

This was all revealed when a canon lawyer, a brave woman named Jennifer Haselberger, told Minnesota Public Radio when she found evidence of a priest who apparently possessed child porn and internal memos discussing whether police should be notified. Archbishop John Nienstedt explained in a memo to the Vatican why he decided not to tell the cops: he was afraid of getting sued and going to jail.

It is unclear whether civil criminal action remains a possibility. The independent investigator hired to look into this matter concluded that 'many of the homosexual pornographic images viewed by this investigator and the computer analyst could be considered borderline illegal, because of the youthful looking images', but the decision of my predecessor was not to report the discovery of the images or the images themselves to law enforcement. My staff has expressed concern that the fact the CD-ROMs containing the images remain in the cleric's personnel file could expose the Archdiocese, as well as myself, to criminal prosecution. These factors also suggest that a penal trial, conducted in this Archdiocese or elsewhere in the United States, is to be avoided.

This doesn't sound like a shepherd ministering to the souls in his congregation. It sounds like the CEO of an oil company shifting blame to his predecessor and staging a coverup after a massive oil spill. Many Minnesota Catholics are justifiably upset and have called for Nienstedt's resignation.

Now some wealthy donors are going to hit the archdiocese where it really hurts: the pocketbook. The archdiocese is launching a $160 million capital campaign, and some wealthy Catholic donors have said they will not contribute unless Nienstedt resigns. One quote in particular from a Nienstedt defender caught my attention:

To those calling for Nienstedt to be tossed out, Derus warned: “The Catholic Church is not a democracy. We don’t get to vote on this or that.”

It's true that the Catholic Church is not a democracy. But lay Catholics do get a vote: they vote with their dollars. And with their feet.

And Catholics have been voting with the feet for centuries. That's how the Protestant Churches, and the Anglican Church, the Orthodox Churches, and all the other sects of the Christian Church were formed. It's called schism, and it often happens because of basic disagreements on doctrine and accusations of heresy. But it happens for political and social reasons as well.

Many Catholics are unhappy with the Church hierarchy. They view the bishops as arrogant and disconnected from the realities of everyday life, more concerned with covering up scandals than preventing them in the first place. The bishops yap dogmatically about birth control and abortion when they have no idea how hard it is to raise a family.

The ranks of the priesthood are being decimated, in large part because of the ban on married priests. Celibacy is not a scriptural requirement; priests could marry for a thousand years, and even today married Anglican priests joining the Catholic Church remain married. Celibacy is an antiquated relic of the Middle Ages enacted to prevent clergy from using Church money to create their own hereditary fiefdoms. Though the most public church sex scandals involve children, removing the marriage ban would also prevent many smaller-scale scandals involving priests who've simply fallen in love with consenting adult women.

Priests are also voting with their feet, and leaving their priesthood to marry. The priest who officiated at my wedding had to quit when he married a nun. A local political activist in my city did the same.

Why, many wonder, should priests be banned from the Church's most basic holy sacrament, the union of a man and a woman? In their arguments against gay marriage the archbishops claim that union to be the bedrock of society, yet they have no personal knowledge of it.

Women are tired of the way nuns are treated, and many resent the fact that women are not allowed to be priests. Many Christian churches allow women pastors these days, in particular the Anglican Church, which split off because of a political tiff when the Vatican was slow to grant Henry VIII an annulment from Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was too old to give him the son he desperately desired. Ironically, the son he strove so hard for died at age 15, and Henry was ultimately succeeded by his daughter, Elizabeth, who ruled for more than 40 years: she and Queen Victoria were arguably the two best monarchs to rule England. The fact that Pope Benedict cleared the way for married Anglican priests to join the Church shows how close the two Churches really are.

Many straight Catholics are unhappy with the way the Church treats gays: Nienstedt spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of Church money to amend the Minnesota constitution to ban gay marriage, an attempt that failed in 2012. Considering how many priests are gay (estimates run as high as 60%), and how the marriage ban discourages straight priests, it is evident that the Church's dogmas are seriously out of balance with reality.

Francis, the new pope, has said many things that give people hope (he even had a girlfriend before he entered the priesthood). The Church often takes decades and even centuries to change, but just one ex cathedra pronouncement could completely alter the Church's trajectory. The ban on women priests is a dogma, but the marriage ban is a regulation and therefore subject to papal decree.

If straight Catholics opt out of the priesthood in large numbers, gays may quietly assume control of archdioceses around the world. Is it only a matter of time before the majority of the Roman curia is gay?

A Third Vatican Council composed of a majority of gay bishops could decide pretty much anything: the Catholic Church isn't a democracy, after all.

Mailbag!

I haven't done a mailbag in a while so here a few emails I had recently

Candace from Missouri writes

What happened to all those world news stories you promised? I would like to see more of them. As a long time reader of your site, I miss the days when the majority of your posts talked about international politics.

Point taken. It has been too long since I talked about other countries. I will endeavor to do so more often!

Bryan from Idaho writes

I'd like to comment but don't want to go through the trouble or give up my privacy to register a name under google or open id. Is there anyone I can still comment openly? The people you have commenting now are real dicks and need to be taken down a notch.

Sorry, Bryan, but I got spammed too much and set up the requirement to register to comment. I'm not going to change that even though it means I have lost some liberal commenters as a result. And you are wasting your time with the individuals of whom you speak. They thrive on attention, adolescent insults and "battle" in comments sections. I allow open comments which means I have picked up some trolls. Oh well. You should take comfort in the fact that their writings do a great job of illustrating my points for me:) Speaking of my commenters...

Izzie from Illinois writes...

I don't want to engage him in comments as my mother told me to never talk to crazy people but do you suppose Not My Name is sitting in some facility somewhere? I think he uses his free time on the computer to post here.

Actually, Izzie, I think NMN is two people. One is an ultra religious fellow and the other is Unix Jedi from TSM which is why he might seem like he has a split personality. Even if that's not true, you have to remember that any mental problems he might have are likely a result of childhood problems and possibly bullying in school so try to have a little sympathy. People who are abused often abuse others because that's what they know. Their desire for constant attention (through adolescent taunts) is pretty apparent.

In fact, I think that's a great explanation for the behavior of many on the Right as I have said previously. They clearly have had trouble with their parents in their lives and were likely ostracized in school. Years of emotional abuse invariably ends in social disabilities and comments sections of blogs.

Geoff from Kansas writes...

Nikto is a better writer than you and I enjoy his posts more than yours.

No doubt, Nikto is a great writer but better? Maybe. I will say that his posts get more hits than mine and his piece on sleep and football was the most popular one in October.

That's it for this mailbag. Keep those emails coming, folks!!